Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 6, 2007

Guide for Migrating to Google Apps

Scott Hanselman has a "definitive guide" that will help you migrate from your existing mail solutions to Google Apps (Premier Edition). He moved his entire family (wife, parents, brothers, cousins, in-laws) to Google Apps, and there wasn't a single solution for everyone. Scott had to buy a software to migrate Microsoft Outlook calendars, email and contacts, and create AIM Mail accounts to move local archives to AIM's IMAP folders that can be imported using Gmail's migration tools (a feature of the Premier Edition of Google Apps).

The guide also offers a hack that lets you transfer your email from one Gmail account to another Gmail account (it should work for normal Gmail accounts too):

The solution is two-fold. First, in the original Gmail account, make sure you've enabled POP Email in Settings|Forwarding and POP and selected Enable POP for ALL MAIL.

Then, logout, and login to your destination account in Google for Apps and from Add an Email Account, enter in the Gmail username and the POP Server as 66.249.93.109. Also, note the non-standard port 995. Don't select "Leave a copy" because Gmail won't let you anyway. However, don't worry, your emails won't be deleted in the source.

The conclusion is that Google still doesn't offer enough tools to make the migration painless and without buying/using third-party solutions.

21 comments:

as for getting one GMail account with another...GMail has an option to forward mail from one e-mail account to another, and it doesn't leave it on the original server. I've been doing it since I first got GMail.

Of course you can forward mail to other Gmail account, but you can't forward old mail (not even using filters). If you didn't setup forwarding from the beginning, you'll have to use Gmail's mail fetcher, but this doesn't work if you leave the default settings. By replacing pop.gmail.com with that IP address, you bypass Gmail's silly validation.

Later edit: apparently it works without using the IP address, but this must be a recent update.

POP fetch didn't use to work for retrieving mail from gmail accounts at the beginning. There were tricks like changing the mail server port number. Now it works without tricks, I managed to do it, it took a while though.

It seems to me that Google apps is a product that doesn't receive many resources from google. They could put all their services under your domain name, I can't see why the just offer docs, gmail, calendar and a start page without bells and whistles.But recently they have upgraded a lot in docs, so I expect them to reveal one day a whole bunch of features even for Apps (maybe a personalized blog for each account?)

I want to be able to migrate everything from my GMail account, not just only the mail. I've got ~500mb of mail that's already labeled, and I don't want to have to re-filter and re-label everything. Also my contacts need to be automagically migrated. I hope the GMail team address this idea sooooon.

Is there any way to convert this Gmail inbox into a Google Apps inbox (something like me@davidm.com)?

-OR-

If it's impossible to "convert" Gmail to Google Apps, maybe I can transfer everything from my current Gmail inbox into the new one?But in this case I need to keep labels, starred and unread messages, send/receive dates, etc...

P.S.Sorry for asking here, but I'm really unable to find any useful info about this, only dumb POP fetching is available.

Can't you use Outlook with IMAP for all your multiple accounts and copy/move mail in that manner? I did this from my .PST file to my Gmail account and hoping to do the same to get it into my Apps account. A few glitches, sure, but seemed to work very easily.

You can also use an online tool for migration of Google Apps to Apps which is available at Google Marketplace from SysCloudSoft http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=14156+5077282021820947710